Bower Defence: It’s Cello Fortress

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The diagram above and the video below are both proof of Cello Fortress, a multiplayer game where four players use tanks to attempt to break into a fortress protected by a cellist, is thing that is real. But I’m calling foul. What’s more likely? That the maker of the pretty racing game Proun has managed to turn the music a cello creates into a gaming art show, or that John has created an elaborate series of blogs, websites, press releases, and even gone so far as to hire actors to video a concert to fake a game? And years from now, when everything is going well for me, he’ll text me telling me it was all a joke to make me look slightly silly and I’ll cry? He’s done it before, and he’ll do it again.
Ok. I’ll go along with it. It’s really rather lovely: a twin-stick shooter where the cellist’s performance controls the type of defenses he puts up against the attackers. High notes produce guns, for example. His score is based on how well he improvises his music. The four players attempt to destroy his cannons. It’s part concert, part art exhibition, and part game.

Developer Joost “Oogst” van Dongen’s devblog talks about the struggle it was to get the whole enterprise working together: “Cello Fortress is a complex project in several ways: playing cello so that it sounds good and controls the game is a big challenge and requires an experienced cellist and a lot of practice. Analysing what the cello plays is also technically very complex and has, as far as I know, never been done before in a computer game.”

My ‘John faked it’ theory is looking pretty water-tight.

Of course if means you need to be in the right place at the right time to experience it. It’s currently only scheduled to be shown in the Netherlands over 2013, but I bet it’ll eventually pop up in international shows. As long as there’s a cellist gamer in the world, the game will be playable.

I get paid over $87 per hour working from home with 2 kids at home. I never thought I’d be able to do it but my best friend earns over 10k a month doing this and she convinced me to try. The potential with this is endless. Heres what I’ve been doing..link to is.gd

Registered to call foul on this as a lapsed cellist. Well, the notes played around 1:00 seem way too low to come from the A-string, which is highest of the four strings and the one that the cellist in the video appears to be playing.

It does make you wonder if only certain musical pieces would work for this, since not every piece has discordant chords, for example, or if you basically need an improvisational world-class cellist to really make this work.

This would be so much more better for guitars I think, since they almost all have a universal 1/4 inch input, and there are millions of people that already know how to play it very well and own instruments. I don’t think the cello is stupid, quite the opposite; it’s just kind of niche.

I don’t know, maybe I’m giving the fortress defense idea a little too much credit. Put a G36 and human silhouettes on screen, and this’ll be the next guitar hero.

While as a guitarist myself I’d love to have a go at this, but without some foot-pedal trickery or a e-bow there’s no way I could sustain as note as long a cello man. Anything I could play on say a acoustic would be shorter and sharper, more “jagged” sounding compared to the cello’s lovely flow between notes. No gaps between chords/strums if you get me.

Not to say it couldn’t work, but Beat hazard would strike me as a much better option for a battle of man vs improv guitarist.

I even failed at the cheap and easy “theremin made of three radios” method a couple weeks ago. =P I’m going to more radios when they show up at any of the nearby thrift stores, and have another try…but I suspect I may see similar results again.

There’s also a dutch band called The Ex. Not sure if your ex is involved with them, but they’re one of the best bands in the world. And they made an album with Tom Cora, who also plays cello! so this is pertinent with the discussion! \o/

Andy Kerr too moved to Netherlands. leQuack, your country is amazing and makes me jealous :°

i thought guitar hero and the like supported actual guitars, or was it just youtubers trying to look cool?
although either way, using a cello is a first, but i’m surprised to read it’s difficult to read it’s audio input

AFAIK it does not support actual guitar input, but I know some people who made Rock Band work with actual drum input.

(If I understood them correctly, the data for the guitar track is not only simplified, but hand-massaged for individual songs. The drums actually have two tracks: one that has all of the information and is only used for the animations, and one that has the data that the user has to match. However, it is a consistent mapping from the actual drum data to the controller input. So, you extract the data from the “for animations” track, play that on a drum kit with MIDI output, run that through a program that knows the rules for simplifying it to what Rock Band expects, and then send that through USB to the consolebox.

Anything in that explanation that didn’t make sense is entirely my fault; I don’t have a perfect understanding of what they did.

Aside: each song also has a track of data for controlling the fog machines, lasers, and spotlights — again for the purpose of the background animations. I tried to convince them they should make use of all that data, too, but AFAIK they never did.)

Go Joost!
I knew he made games, I knew he played the Cello (maybe actually played together with him in some music jam: saxophone and cello don’t quite mix, but anyway) but never put the 2 together.
He was also the programmer on the first version of “de Blob”, and is one of the founders of Ronimo games (known for Swords& Soldiers and Awesomenauts).

I want to make a version for the Great Highland Bagpipes. They were banned by the English, who considered them a weapon of war (a battlefield communication device) so it is appropriate to use them as a games controller.

Ooh, think of that, commanding your regiments in Napoleon Total War by playing authentic marching tunes!